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TwitterAbleton Live Quick Tip: Creating Inspiration With The MIDI Devices
Today’s Ableton tutorial is all about finding or creating inspiration on those days when writer’s block is kicking your ass. Anyone that writes music on a regular basis is going to run into this problem once in a while, but for working professionals, simply choosing not to write isn’t always an option.
If you have a looming deadline for writing a little theme song or doing a small piece of sound design, it’s easy to forget that (for better or for worse) modern digital music production tools can even start our songs for us.
Randomizer & Scale: Two peas in a pod
If you use Ableton Live, there are some handy tools to do just that, and today I want to cover some extremely basic yet effective uses for two of them: Randomizer and Scale.
I know some people are going to object passionately to the idea of using a tool to generate melodic ideas out of thin air. However, I have no desire to turn this into an exhaustive, academic discussion about whether the machines have indeed taken over ala “Terminator,” so please keep your comments on track with creative or technical suggestions.
In the following video, I show you how to turn a simple rhythm that never deviates from a single pitch into multiple melodic ideas as well as recording this randomness so that you can further revise the resulting MIDI phrases:
5 Responses to “Ableton Live Quick Tip: Creating Inspiration With The MIDI Devices”
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I don’t necessarily agree with people over criticizing the use of artificial means of melody inception, mostly because a lot of the best synth lines of the past century came out of random patching of modular synths, that only proves that randomness means, more often than not, you will allow variables into your creative process that would otherwise not penetrate it.
It is creative as a gesture, to even just set your options on the randomizing devices. I often chain arpegiators with different types of note cuts, sometimes more than ten in a row. If these tools are here, they are meant to be used… we would otherwise NOT be able to generate the melody ourselves.
Nicely said, Kaspar.
The way I see it, it doesn’t matter where the melody came from, your head or your MIDI devices – ultimately it’s a human being that makes the decision “that’s cool, I´ll use that”, and the song either sucks or it’s great.
It’s the same type of situation as what seperates a great DJ from a not so great one – both are playing other people’s music, but one understands what goes together and one does not.
well said
I think we have been using randomness to make music for a lot longer than computers have been around. I have heard of old blues player talking about the sounds of a horse clip clopping down the road inspiring a rhythm or rain dripping into a pie pan making a melody. There is nothing artificial about it. Like Einar said the human makes the decision about what stays and what goes, what is good and what is bad.